


Human Things

by linaerys



Category: True Blood
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-12-23
Updated: 2010-12-23
Packaged: 2017-10-14 00:02:39
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,058
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/143137
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/linaerys/pseuds/linaerys
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Eric and Godric have been together for a century when Eric feels a longing to go home.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Human Things

**Author's Note:**

  * For [exeterlinden](https://archiveofourown.org/users/exeterlinden/gifts).



Burgundy, France. 12th Century.

One of the monks lies dead at Godric’s feet, between them. Eric toes it out of the way so he can kneel in front of Godric. He is an easier master after he feeds, and with the blood of half a dozen men painting the stone walls, Godric looks sated and pleased.

“It has been close on a hundred years since . . ,” says Eric.

“Since I turned you,” says Godric. His lips turn up in that bloodthirsty grin that makes Eric’s lips move as well, as if they are one flesh.

 _We_ are _one flesh_ , Godric’s blood whispers to him from within his veins, deeper than words. Eric could close his eyes, and ride that feeling, ride the waves of dark, sweet pleasure that blossom forth from Godric’s fingers. If his father could see him now. This is doubtless worse than losing himself between the legs of a woman.

“It’s been nearly a hundred years since my father was killed,” says Eric, trying not to be swept up in the forgetfulness that Godric’s touch offers. He bows his head against Godric’s hand. “I would like to visit his barrow.”

He half-expects Godric to chide him. They are above human things. They deal in death, and blood, and destruction. The dead and dying around them attest to that. Mourning and revenge are beneath them.

“Must it be tonight?” Godric asks. Behind him, one of the lay brothers moans still, clutching his guts in his hands. Another has bled out into a vat of wine. Godric follows Eric’s glance.

“Your father deserves a wake,” says Godric. “He was a king, was he not?” He gestures for Eric to find his feet. An open cask of wine reflects the light of the chandelier swinging back and forth overhead. Two of the candles were extinguished by the splattering blood, but the others still flicker. The swaying lights make Eric’s head feel light.

Godric cups the wine in his hands and takes a drink, letting the red liquid flow down his chin and mix with the blood drying there. “I love French monks. None of that English ale for them. Even their blood tastes better.” He licks his lips. The dying man moans again. “Would you?” Godric asks.

The man had fallen against the stairs, after Eric fed from his femoral artery and ripped open the flesh of his belly. Left on his own, he will face a slow and painful death, here among the other dead. Part of Eric wants to leave him alive. It is the Viking way, to leave a few survivors to tell the terrible tale, and make the next conquest that much easier, riding on a tide of fear.

He and Godric have no need of that. No force can stand against them, not if they remain cloaked in darkness and secrecy. Eric tears out the man’s throat with his bare hand.

Now Godric holds another pool of blood-in-wine cupped in his hand. “Drink,” he says.

Eric laps the wine from his palm, tasting the flesh underneath, working his tongue between Godric’s fingers, to taste every soft crevice, every drop.

“Ah, Eric,” Godric sighs. “Tonight you may drink deeper.”

Eric’s heart beats faster at the thought. Only once since Eric’s rebirth has Godric allowed him to taste his blood, and that was to mark the occasion of the first time Eric controlled his feeding and left his victim alive. The first time too, that he didn’t lose himself entirely in Godric’s flesh, in the absolute submission between maker and child.

He can’t remember the first time they were lovers, but he suspects it is lost in those first days of blood orgy, when Eric fed and fed; the blood of two armies could not slake his thirst. In those days when Godric was his whole world, when he did not exist save for when Godric looked at him, when he was a slave to his body: a monstrous, starving thing, and lived only when Godric touched him.

“What would you have of me?” Eric asks.

Godric smiles in answer. He pulls Eric’s blood-sodden shirt off his shoulder, and traces his finger down Eric’s sticky skin. “All of you,” says Godric. “Now and forever.”

The ground is slick with blood and wine, but it feels like finest down as Eric pulls Godric on top of him, and kisses him, tongues and lips sliding between Godric’s fangs. Eric can taste his own blood as it coats his tongue, mixed with the blood of these sacrifices and the wine. He’s usually careful, in these moments, to keep his fangs sheathed, or Godric will deprive him of the perfect, hungry bow of his mouth, counseling Eric's control. Now Godric urges him on. Eric’s teeth tear his lip. Godric’s blood fills his mouth.

Godric’s rubbing against him as they bite and heal and drink and bite and heal again. His blood tastes like the frenzy of battle, the comfort of home, the coldness of death, in one heady draught. He’s riding that high, that dark chariot, when he feels Godric’s fingers wrap around him. That too? It is a night of joys. All in memory of—he laughs out loud—in memory of his father. Eric can hardly remember the man’s name, much less his face.

“You are mine, Eric. And I am yours. Open me. I desire you in me.”

Eric’s blood-slick fingers perform their task. Godric’s eyes shine like black pebbles in the candlelight. He sinks down on Eric—in one motion Eric is in deep. Godric throws his head back. His bloody lips glisten. He’s hot inside with the blood they just drank, holding Eric captive.

“Taste me again,” he whispers. Eric sits up, holding Godric to him. Eric feeds on heart’s blood now, the vein just under Godric’s neck, where the blood is so close to the surface, he can smell it even before it fills his mouth. He drives into Godric as Godric’s blood flows into him, so complete together that nothing else need exist.

“ _Father, brother . . ._ ” Godric whispers.

“ _Child, lover,”_ Eric replies, as Godric’s flesh knits against his lips.

They lie locked together in the cooling blood that coats the floor, until Godric says, “You may go and visit your father.”

It sounds like a dismissal, and even joined like this, Eric’s blood grows cold at the thought of the months they would need to spend apart as he goes north. “He can wait. Godric . . .”

Above him, the stone arches look like the ribs of a starving man. Godric disentangles from Eric finally and lies by his side. Lying like this, Eric is reminded of how small Godric is. Truly like the child Eric first took him for. The coming dawn makes him quiet and withdrawn. “I didn’t know my mortal father. And I never knew my maker.”

Eric would sooner cut off his own arm, stand in the light of a desert sun, than live without Godric, and he starts to say so, when Godric lays a finger against his lips. “I was taken to Britain as a Roman slave, too young to remember any other life. The pagans there named me. I was a too-pretty boy slave, who was left to die in the woods when I was injured beyond my usefulness by the master’s son.

“Who found me, I cannot say. But he made me into this. I killed my former masters, and so many more. I have bathed in the blood of generations and never mourned a single human. Until you, I never found anyone I would mourn.”

His fingers stir on Eric’s skin. Eric’s breath catches, a human habit that Godric has long since left behind.

“I will go with you, child, to your father’s grave. Where you mourn, I mourn.”

**

They trek northward at the next dusk. The nights grow longer and the towns grow sparser as they push north from Denmark into the deeply forested mountains of Eric’s home.

It is weeks past the darkest night of the year when they stand at Eric’s father’s barrow. He was a king, and so a few golden objects were buried with him. In summer, grass and wildflowers must cover this mound, but now it is a heap of snow, indistinguishable from those that cover the boulders and shrubs of this high pasture. Eric digs for the rock underneath the hardened earth, tearing off his nails as he plunges his hand in.

“I will kill the wight who did this,” says Eric. He puts his hand on the stone. It is cold, even to his vampiric senses. Nothing here reminds him of his father: provincial, autocratic, and the only standard Eric had to measure himself against until Godric. He can smell old death here, dust and bones.

“Eric, vengeance is . . .”

“Human?”

“Yes. Together we are Death. We strike without cause, and without warning. Do the gods have justification for who they take?”

Eric thinks of his gods, of Tyr who showed the greatest bravery of any god and lost his hand for it. Of Odin who summons his favorite warriors to Valhalla to fight on the side of light against the coming darkness.

A darkness that he is part of now. In this new life, he owes more to Loki, the consuming fire, the trickster who brings death without reason, to innocent and wicked alike. And Godric, the only god he’s ever met face to face.

“Not all of them,” Eric half-agrees.

Even for creatures such as them, the bitter cold of a blizzard is unpleasant. A few leagues away, they find a household. It isn’t his father’s fine hall—Eric burnt that to the ground when he was still human, the screams of those who would usurp his father’s throne singing in his ears—but a more modest farmstead that stands in the lee of a nearby hill.

They outface the driving winds to get there. Eric can see nothing in the blowing snow, but the scent of a homely farm, and the warm blood of human and animal draws him onward. He knocks at the door of the house and speaks the words, asking for hospitality.

Although outside is still the full dark of a Nordic winter, it must be nearing morning. Already one of the slaves is stirring porridge for breakfast.

“Trappers?” asks the lady of the house when she beckons them in. She is a stout middle aged woman, with a housewife’s keys dangling at her waist. Eric shrugs and nods an agreement.

“Thank you. We need a place to rest for a few hours.”

She gives them hot, fermented milk, and lets them sleep in the rooms nearest the cows, warmed by their body-heat through the earthen walls.

“Shall they live, Eric?” Godric asks when they lie down next to each other on the straw mattresses. They are as close as two Viking sailors under the North Atlantic sky, sharing a seal-skin bag for warmth. But with no fresh blood in the last few days, no warmth flows between them.

“Can gods sometimes be merciful?” Eric asks. Even cold, he is drawn to Godric’s touch. Godric’s fingers slip along Eric’s shoulder, making him shudder shamelessly. They are tucked between cows on one side and his people on the other, hungry, and so tired and dirty that he feels almost human, but even here, Godric’s touch makes his blood sing, makes even his hunger taste like wine.

“If you asked it, I would revel in their blood, as we have so many others. I would make this farm a haunted place for centuries to come as we return here to take our pleasure.” As Eric says it, he sees the images in his mind, and the hunger rises, the blood thirst, the Godric-thirst. Somewhere in the house, a baby cries, inconsolable.

“Quiet, child,” says Godric. He rests his head on Eric’s shoulder. The blood lust dims. The smell of cows and hay is comforting. For a moment Eric feels like the child Godric names him. “They may live. I am Death, but you are my Life-In-Death. I would not take that from you. Now sleep.”

Sleep. The word slides down Eric’s spine, carrying him into the sweet oblivion that vampire flesh may find, the rest that will bring a new night, and a thousand bloody tomorrows.


End file.
